Amnesty by Executive OrderAmnesty may be coming without Congress. According to a White House release, Barack Obama is looking at how to manage the deportation system "more humanely within the confines of the law." The White House announced the shift after the president met with three leading members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The statement said, "The president emphasized his deep concern about the pain too many families feel from the separation that comes from our broken immigration system." Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) in particular couldn't understand why Obama could issue waivers and delays on ObamaCare and yet not change the immigration system on his own. A fair point -- when the "confines of the law" don't actually confine a president, where is the line?

A Special Prosecutor for the IRSDespite her denials, it's now plain that Lois Lerner was deeply involved in targeting conservative nonprofit groups.By Jim JordanMarch 19, 2014 7:22 p.m. ET

The House Oversight Committee's investigation of the IRS is at an inflection point. The president's congressional supporters realize that the administration's version of the agency's targeting of conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status—such as blaming local officials in the Cincinnati office or claiming that liberal groups were victimized along with conservative groups—is nonsense. Instead of debating the substance, they have resorted to procedural antics and misleading rhetoric.

I have spent a considerable amount of time and energy on the investigation—which included 38 daylong interviews of IRS and Treasury employees ranging from line employees in Cincinnati to the IRS commissioner to the chief of staff of the U.S. Treasury. The real news has been revealed at the Lois Lerner hearing on March 5 and in the report of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on March 11: "Lois Lerner's Involvement in the IRS Targeting of Tax-Exempt Organizations."

The evidence brought to light in that hearing and report completely discredited Ms. Lerner's claims about her involvement in what went on. It also eviscerated the notion that liberal and conservative groups were targeted.Enlarge Image

Former IRS official Lois Lerner at a March 5 congressional hearing where she declined to testify. Associated Press

When Ms. Lerner appeared before Congress in May 2013, she made this statement: "I have done nothing wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations." But Ms. Lerner, we discovered, forwarded confidential taxpayer information to her personal email account in early May 2013, which is a violation of IRS rules. About the infamous "Be on the Lookout" targeting list—a document used to identify conservative groups for additional scrutiny—she told Congress that the criteria for screening tax-exempt groups for extra scrutiny never changed. In fact, she personally ordered it changed in July 2011 according to documents and testimony received by the committee.

Ms. Lerner was most certainly driven by politics. One email of June 11, 2011, shows that she directed her subordinate to focus on the issues surrounding the application of Karl Rove's group, Crossroads GPS. In another email of Feb. 1, 2011, she frets about the Supreme Court "overturning the ban on corporate spending" as it applies to nonprofits. (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission also overturned the ban on union political spending, but she expressed no concern about that.)

Emails and testimony that we confronted Ms. Lerner with showed her saying that the tea party is "very dangerous," ordering a "multitiered review" (read: delay) of the cases, and managing the optics of her operation so it would not be revealed as a political project.

Last May, and again on March 5 of this year, Ms. Lerner refused to answer the committee's questions about the IRS treatment of tax-exempt groups, asserting her right under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Yet we learned on March 6 in reporting by this newspaper that she had previously given an interview to the Justice Department and, according to her lawyer, spoke with no grant of immunity.

Ms. Lerner's lawyer claims she gave an interview to the Justice Department because she did not believe the Oversight Committee would treat her fairly. More likely, the reason is because Justice is friendly territory. The lead investigator is a substantial Obama campaign contributor, and Justice has already leaked that it doesn't expect to prosecute anyone. As to the claim that liberal groups were also victimized, our committee investigation has yet to hear from a single progressive group that received the systematic scrutiny and harassment faced by the tea party and other conservative groups.

Congress is charged with oversight of the executive branch. The House Oversight Committee will not stop until we have all the answers, although I fully expect continued obstruction from the Obama administration and its foot soldiers in the House.

When Congress is thwarted in our attempts to get answers—as is clearly the case given Ms. Lerner's willingness to speak with the Justice Department but not to the public's elected representatives—we have an obligation to hold accountable those hiding the facts. Contempt of Congress is a power the House of Representatives exercised toward only five individuals in the last 30 years. The relevant statute states that any person who "willfully makes default, or who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry" may be held in contempt. Ms. Lerner's actions easily rise to a level worthy of contempt and Congress's institutional integrity demands nothing less.

Additionally, it is necessary to appoint a special prosecutor. Mr. Holder called the IRS matter "outrageous and unacceptable" and ordered a Justice Department investigation to be conducted in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No one can have confidence in this investigation, started by a politically appointed attorney general and led by a campaign contributor to his boss.

A special prosecutor, uncompromised by partisan political winds, provides hope of uncovering what happened at the IRS. As Elijah Cummings, my Democratic colleague on the Oversight Committee, said on May 22, 2013—the day of the committee's first IRS hearing—getting the truth and restoring trust must be paramount. "This is more important than one election," he explained. "The revelations that have come forward so far provides us with a moment pregnant for transformation; not transformation for a moment, but for generations to come and generations yet unborn."

I hope Mr. Cummings and fellow members of his party will join me in acknowledging the time has come for the appointment of an independent and unbiased special prosecutor.

Mr. Jordan, a Republican congressman from Ohio, serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Government. He is also chairman of its subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs.

Philly DA Blows the Whistle on Pennsylvania’s State AG Why did the AG drop a case that exposed Democratic corruption?

By John Fund

Prosecutors almost never go to war against each other. But in Pennsylvania, Democratic attorney general Kathleen Kane is being brutally criticized by Seth Williams, Philadelphia’s district attorney and a fellow Democrat. Williams is upset that last year one of Kane’s first acts in office was to decline to prosecute four Philadelphia state legislators and other government officials. In a sting operation, all had been caught accepting cash or Tiffany jewelry in exchange for votes or favors. Kane, who is white, has defended herself, saying that the investigation was badly managed and tainted by racism. She claims the criticism comes from what she calls the “Good Ol’ Boys Club.” Williams, who is African American, has shot back: “I have seen racism. I know what it looks like. This isn’t it.”

The sting operation followed pretty much the same playbook as the federal Abscam investigation of the 1970s. Begun in 2010, the Philly probe was conducted under Kane’s three immediate predecessors as attorney general, and it resulted in more than 400 hours of video and audio recordings. Tyron B. Ali, a lobbyist originally from Trinidad, served as the undercover agent; after he was charged with fraud, he agreed to wear a wire in exchange for lenient treatment. Word of his cash offers eventually got around and prompted some elected officials to call him first. “Sources with knowledge of the sting said the investigation made financial pitches to both Republicans and Democrats, but only Democrats accepted the payments,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week.

Attorney General Kane inherited the investigation when she took office in January 2013. She told the Inquirer that she stopped it without filing any charges because it was “poorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism.” She quoted Claude Thomas, the chief investigator in the case, as saying he had been ordered to target “only members of the General Assembly’s Black Caucus” and to ignore “potentially illegal acts by white members.”

In response, Williams issued an angry statement and penned an op-ed in Sunday’s Inquirer. “The notion that they would target anyone based on race is ridiculous,” Williams said in a statement. “I am confident they are not racist, and it is regrettable that the attorney general would casually throw around such an explosive accusation.” Thomas, who is also African American, now works for Williams and denies he ever made such a statement.

What is clear is just how damning some of the collected evidence is. The Inquirer reported this exchange between Ali, the lobbyist, and state representative Vanessa Brown:

Ali went to Brown’s office and handed her an envelope with $2,000, according to people who have reviewed a transcript of a tape Ali made on that day.

As Brown accepted the money, they said, she put it in her purse and said: “Yo, good looking and Ooowee. . . . Thank you twice.”

After he gave Brown the money, Ali urged her to vote against a bill that would require voters to show identification at the polls, the sources said.

Kane’s supporters say that federal law-enforcement officials she consulted believed the probe had suffered from a lack of “quality control” and could be viewed as entrapment. “Is the acceptance of cash alarming? Absolutely,” one person close to Kane told the Inquirer. “But you’ve got to think: I’ve got to try this case.”

It certainly may have been politically awkward for Kane, as a Democrat, to prosecute only African-American defendants, but a conviction on something should have been a slam dunk. Even if prosecutors couldn’t prove a quid pro quo, it is illegal for politicians to accept payments to enrich themselves and also illegal not to report the income. Further, the prosecutors in this case have a sterling track record in securing convictions against the leadership of both parties in the legislature, winning 21 convictions in the 2010 “Bonusgate” scandal, which involved illegal payments to legislative staffers who performed political work. All of those convicted were white.

Kane has declined to answer detailed questions about why she dropped the investigation. Her critics, she says, are “playing political games to discredit me in order to fulfill their own selfish and improper agenda.” When she met with Inquirer editors last Thursday, she brought her personal attorney and on his advice declined to answer any questions after the meeting. Her attorney says she may file a defamation suit against the paper, a ploy frequently used by public figures to intimidate journalists.

Williams says he is tired of Kane’s “escalating excuses.” He points out that when she took office, the files on the probe were with federal prosecutors who hadn’t yet concluded whether they wanted to pursue their own case. “All she had to do was leave the investigation in the hands of federal authorities,” Williams wrote in Sunday’s Inquirer. “But she didn’t do that. Instead, she asked for the files back. And then, after going out of the way to reclaim the investigation, she shut it down.”

One bit player in the drama, who had dealings with Ali and was shocked to learn later that Ali was a government agent, says the whole thing reminds him of a John Grisham novel. My vote is for House of Cards. And from what we know so far, it shouldn’t be too hard to start matching up some of the Philadelphia players with their dramatic counterparts in the Netflix series.

— John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.

Transparency and truth are the fuels that run sophisticated civilizations. Without them, the state grinds to a halt. Lack of trust – not barbarians on the frontier, global warming or cooling, or even epidemics – doomed civilizations of the past, from imperial Rome to the former Soviet Union.

The United States can withstand the untruth of a particular presidential administration if the permanent government itself is honest. Dwight Eisenhower lied about the downed U-2 spy plane inside the Soviet Union. Almost nothing Richard Nixon said about Watergate was true. Intelligence reports of vast stockpiles of WMD in Iraq proved as accurate as Bill Clinton's assertion that he never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Presidents fib. The nation gets outraged. The independent media digs out the truth. And so the system of trust repairs itself.

What distinguishes democracies from tin-horn dictatorships and totalitarian monstrosities are our permanent meritocratic government bureaus that remain nonpartisan and honestly report the truth.

The Benghazi, Associated Press and National Security Agency scandals are scary, but not as disturbing as growing doubts about the honesty of permanent government itself. It is no longer crackpot to doubt the once impeccable and nonpartisan IRS. When it assured the public that it was not making decisions about tax-exempt status based on politics, it lied. One of its top commissioners, Lois Lerner, resigned and invoked the Fifth Amendment.

A system of voluntary tax reporting rests on trust. If the IRS itself is untruthful, will it be able to expect truthful compliance from taxpayers?

Many doubt the officially reported government unemployment rates. That statistic is vital in assessing economic growth and is of enormous political importance in the way citizens vote.

It was reported in November that the Census Bureau may have fabricated survey results during the 2012 presidential campaign, sending false data to the Labor Department that could have altered official employment statistics. In the 1990s, the method of assessing the official unemployment rate was massaged to make it seem lower than it actually was. Rules were changed to ignore millions who had been out of work longer than 52 weeks. They were suddenly classified as permanent dropouts and not part of the idled workforce.

Does the government release an accurate report on quarterly Gross Domestic Product growth – another vital barometer of how the economy is doing? Maybe not. Last year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis for the first time factored research and development costs of businesses into statistics on investment growth.

Suddenly, a cost became proof of business output and thus was added into the business investment contribution to GDP. That new accounting gimmick may have added hundreds of billions of dollars into the equation of figuring GDP growth last year alone. Not surprisingly, the government reported unexpectedly high 2.8 percent GDP growth after the changes.

Is inflation really as low as the government insists? In recent times the government has not just counted the increase in the prices of goods, but also factored into its calculus theories about changing consumer buying habits when prices increase. The changes have resulted in officially lowered inflation rates.

No one knows how many Americans have now bought and paid for Affordable Care Act health insurance policies. There is no accurate information about how many young people have enrolled – critical to the success of Obamacare. Nor do Americans know how many enrollees were previously uninsured. Nor does the public know how many enrollees simply switched insurance from Medicaid to the Affordable Care Act. There is no information about how many actually have paid their premiums.

No one knows how many foreign citizens who entered the U.S. illegally were apprehended inside the United States and returned to their country of origin last year – a figure vital for any compromise on passing comprehensive immigration reform.

The Obama administration claims near-record numbers of deportations. In fact, once again government agencies – in this case the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have mysteriously changed the way they compile statistics. The ICE now counts as deportations those foreign nationals whom the Border Patrol immediately stops or turns away at the border. Such detentions were not previously counted as deportations.

The result is that bureaucrats can report near-record numbers of deportations, while privately assuring the administration that immigration enforcement has been greatly relaxed.

There is a pattern here. Changes in data collection seem to have a predictable result: Inflation and unemployment rates become lower. Economic growth becomes greater. The IRS focuses on government skeptics. The Affordable Care Act is not in trouble. Illegal immigration is not such a problem.

If the people increasingly believe that bureaucrats try to alter realty to reflect preconceived ideologies or the goals of the particular regime in power, then America as we know it is finished.

April 10, 2014A Key IRS Manager, Dreaming of Working for the Obama Campaign

Remember that IRS investigation that seemed to have gone dormant? It woke up with a start Wednesday:

A House committee voted to refer a former top Internal Revenue Service official to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, charging that she personally engineered crackdowns on large conservative organizations such as Crossroads GPS in addition to smaller tea-party groups.

Republicans also said the official, Lois Lerner, cooperated with a Democratic lawmaker in scrutinizing a conservative Texas group…

The referral letter, approved Wednesday by the committee in a party-line vote, says Ms. Lerner pushed IRS officials to deny an application for tax-exempt status by Crossroads in 2013. Around the same time, she also pushed other officials to audit Crossroads's activities to date.

"The evidence shows that without Lerner's intervention, neither adverse action would have been taken against Crossroads," the letter states.

Crossroads President Steven Law said the investigation "confirms that there was an organized high-level effort within the IRS to subvert the agency's own standards and procedures in order to harass law-abiding conservative advocacy groups like Crossroads GPS."

Ms. Lerner also asked for an internal IRS meeting concerning applications by other conservative groups, according to the letter.

Committee Republicans said Ms. Lerner appeared to show no interest in cracking down on liberal groups also seeking to operate as 501(c)(4) social-welfare organizations. According to emails the committee reviewed, Ms. Lerner emailed a colleague in response to a news story about the formation of Organizing for Action, an offshoot of President Barack Obama's campaign: "Oh--maybe I can get the DC office job!"

Until now, the focus of congressional investigations has been on IRS treatment of grass-roots tea-party groups. The new angle of the investigation suggests lawmakers believe IRS officials targeted higher-profile conservative groups that have emerged as important players in campaigns.

Then there's this potential explanation for why Democrats on the Government Reform Committee fought Issa every step of the way:

Issa on Wednesday accused the Maryland Democrat of colluding with the Internal Revenue Service in its targeting of the conservative nonprofit group True the Vote, whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said she received multiple letters from Cummings in 2012 and personal visits from the IRS and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Explosives. Engelbrecht's True the Vote is one of the many conservative groups that claims to have been improperly targeted by the IRS while it scrutinized the applications of tea-party groups.

In a letter signed by his five subcommittee chairmen, Issa raised the possibility that Cummings coordinated with the IRS, "surreptitiously" contacting the agency to request information about True the Vote.

Get ready for more fireworks today: "The Oversight Committee will convene on Thursday morning to vote on whether to hold Lerner in contempt for her refusal to testify before the panel and House speaker John Boehner has indicated he will take the matter before the full House."

Nearly a year into the IRS scandal, we still don't know exactly what happened—though we are finally getting an inkling. That's thanks to the letter House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp sent this week to the Justice Department recommending a criminal probe of Lois Lerner.

The average citizen might be dizzied by the torrent of confusing terms—BOLO lists, Tigta, 501(c)(4)—and the array of accusations that have made up this IRS investigation. Mr. Camp's letter takes a step back to remind us why this matters, even as it provides compelling new information that goes to motive and method—and clarifies some of the curious behavior of Democrats during the investigation.

Motive: Republicans began this investigation looking for a direct link between the White House and IRS targeting. The more probable explanation all along was that Ms. Lerner felt emboldened by Democratic attacks against conservative groups to do what came naturally to her. We know from the record that she disdained money in politics. And we know from her prior tenure at the Federal Election Commission that she had a particular animus against conservative organizations.

As the illuminating timeline accompanying the Camp letter shows, Ms. Lerner's focus on shutting down Crossroads GPS came only after Obama adviser David Axelrod listed Crossroads among "front groups for foreign-controlled companies"; only after Senate Democrats Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, Chuck Schumer and others demanded the IRS investigate Crossroads; only after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a website to "expose donors" of Crossroads; and only after Obama's campaign lawyer, Bob Bauer, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about Crossroads.

The information in Mr. Camp's letter shows that Ms. Lerner sprang to action following a January 2013 meeting with Democracy 21, a campaign-finance outfit petitioning for a crackdown on Crossroads and the liberal big-dollar Priorities USA. (She never touched Priorities, run by former Obama aides.) The Camp outline suggests cause and effect, and that's new.

Method: The general prohibition on releasing taxpayer information has meant that—up until Ways and Means voted Wednesday to release this info—it was impossible to know what precise actions Ms. Lerner had taken against whom. We now know that she took it upon herself to track down the status of Crossroads, to give grief to an IRS unit for not having audited it, to apparently direct another unit to deny it tax-exempt status, and to try to influence the appeals process.

We know, too, that Ms. Lerner did some of this in contravention of IRS policy, for instance involving herself in an audit decision that was supposed to be left to a special review committee. We have the story of a powerful bureaucrat targeting an organization and circumventing IRS safeguards against political or personal bias. That ought to mortify all members of Congress. That Democrats seem not to care gets to another point.

Aftermath: Democrats quickly dropped any feigned outrage over IRS targeting and circled the wagons around the agency. Why? The targeting was outrageous, the public was fuming, and nobody likes the IRS. Joining with Republicans would have only been right and popular.

That is, unless Democrats are worried. As the Camp timeline and details show, the IRS responded to liberal calls to go after conservative groups. Democrats weren't just sending letters. Little noticed in the immediate aftermath of the IRS scandal was a letter sent May 23, 2013, by Carl Levin and (Republican) John McCain to the new acting director of the IRS disguised as an expression of outrage over IRS targeting. Artfully hidden within it was Mr. Levin's acknowledgment that his subcommittee on investigations had for a full year been corresponding and meeting with IRS staff (including Ms. Lerner) to ask "why it was not enforcing the 501(c)(4) statute."

What was said in the course of that year? How much specific information was demanded on conservative groups, and how many demands dispensed on how to handle them? Good questions.

In 2012, both the IRS and Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings were targeting the group True the Vote. We now have email showing contact between a Cummings staffer and the IRS over that organization. How much more contact was there? It's one thing to write a public letter calling on a regulator to act. It's another to haul the regulator in front of your committee, or have your staff correspond with or pressure said regulator, with regard to ongoing actions. That's a no-no.

The final merit of Mr. Camp's letter is that he's called out Justice and Democrats. Mr. Camp was careful in laying out the ways Ms. Lerner may have broken the law, with powerful details. Democrats can't refute the facts, so instead they are howling about all manner of trivia—the release of names, the "secret" vote to release taxpayer information. But it remains that they are putting themselves on record in support of IRS officials who target groups, circumvent rules, and potentially break the law. That ought to go down well with voters.

Score another one for free political speech. On Tuesday, Federal District Judge Rudolph Randa soundly rejected a motion to dismiss a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Wisconsin prosecutors who are investigating the political activities of conservative groups (but not liberals).

In a 19-page ruling, Judge Randa wrote that Wisconsin Club for Growth Director Eric O'Keefe's claim that the unlawful investigation violates his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights may proceed. Mr. O'Keefe has standing to bring the lawsuit because "chilled speech is, unquestionably, an injury supporting standing" and that claim doesn't depend on whether he is charged with a crime; "the threat of prosecution is enough."

Prosecutors argued that the federal suit couldn't proceed under the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Younger v. Harris, which prevents federal courts from intervening in a criminal prosecution. That precedent doesn't apply here, Judge Randa wrote, because the state's secretive John Doe proceeding is not a prosecution but "an investigatory device, similar to a grand jury proceeding, but lacking the oversight of a jury."

The Younger exemption also does not apply, the judge added, when the plaintiffs allege that the prosecution was "brought in bad faith for the purpose of retaliating for or deterring the exercise of constitutionally protected rights." Mr. O'Keefe's claim easily satisfies that requirement with its assertion that the John Doe investigation into possible campaign finance violations has been selectively used as a "pretext" to target conservative groups and deter their political engagement.

"The success or failure of O'Keefe's claims do not depend upon the state court's interpretation of its own campaign finance laws," Judge Randa wrote. "O'Keefe's rights under the First Amendment are not outweighed by the state's purported interest in running a secret John Doe investigation that targets conservative activists."

The ruling means that those named in the lawsuit, including special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, Democratic prosecutors John Chisholm, Bruce Landgraf, David Robles and Government Accountability Board contractor Dean Nickel can be held personally liable. The judge rejected their claims of immunity, noting that a prosecutor's absolute immunity is "limited to the performance of his prosecutorial duties, and not to other duties to which he might to assigned by his superiors or perform on his own initiative, such as investigating a crime before an arrest or indictment."

The John Doe probe has been a one-sided investigation conducted against political opponents to chill their ability to influence elections, and now the prosecutors will have to defend themselves in open court.

I wonder if we will ever know why this suddenly heated up and why they suddenly backed down. Why does the federal government still own 80% of Nevada? How do we have armed resources available for this but can't defend our country 75 miles inside our southern border? Will we waive the turtle protection when solar panels become the encroachment? Again and again, it is whom you know (Harry Reid?), not what the law saws.

The relevant facts are these: 1) Very powerful political interests in Washington insist upon the scrupulous enforcement of environmental laws, and if that diminishes the interests of private property owners, so much the better, in their view. 2) Very powerful political interests in Washington do not wish to see the scrupulous enforcement of immigration laws, and if that undercuts the bottom end of the labor market or boosts Democrats’ long-term chances in Texas, so much the better, in their view. This isn’t the rule of law. This is the rule of narrow, parochial, self-interested political factions masquerading as the rule of law.

I don't have a citation for it, but I have seen in several usually sound sources reports that the Census Bureau is changing the questions it asks with regard to health care and that the net effect will be that it will eliminate a consistent basis for data with regards to how many people do not have health insurance and that Team Obama will be able to, yet again, lie.

In other words, yet again the non-political agencies of our government are being politicized.

I don't have a citation for it, but I have seen in several usually sound sources reports that the Census Bureau is changing the questions it asks with regard to health care and that the net effect will be that it will eliminate a consistent basis for data with regards to how many people do not have health insurance and that Team Obama will be able to, yet again, lie.

In other words, yet again the non-political agencies of our government are being politicized.

The legal left and media are always last to know, but there are the makings of a correction in how the courts police conflicts between the political branches. President Obama's serial executive power abuses—on health care, immigration, marijuana and much else—may be inspiring a heathy rejoinder.

Under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to create and amend laws and the President to faithfully execute them, but Mr. Obama has grabbed inherent Article I powers by suspending or rewriting statutes he opposes. The President has usurped Congress with impunity because he assumes no one has the legal standing to challenge him.

Most of the time people who are exempted from laws do not suffer the concrete injuries that the judiciary can redress, while the courts maintain a presumption that Members of Congress also lack such standing. In 1997's Raines v. Byrd, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit against the line-item veto brought by six Congressmen because the loss of legislative power they challenged was a "wholly abstract and widely dispersed" injury.

But that doesn't mean that conduct that marginalizes the legislative branch is absolved of judicial review. In one notable case, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is suing the White House over the ObamaCare regulatory carve-out that conjured up special subsidies for Members and staffers who were supposed to give up federal employee health benefits to join the insurance exchanges.

Mr. Johnson argues that because Members must designate which staffers do and don't participate, the rule imposes a nontrivial administrative burden—i.e., he has standing to sue because the rule harms his office, not because he is a U.S. Senator. More to the point, Mr. Johnson claims that the rule forces him to become personally complicit in law breaking and thus damages his political reputation. Several appeals court precedents hold that elected officials who must maintain the public trust suffer injuries when their credibility is undermined, including a 1993 D.C. Circuit ruling by now-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The White House claims Mr. Johnson lacks standing, but that's because the lawyers don't want to get near the merits. The real import of his lawsuit is that it invites the courts to restore the proper separation of powers amid executive encroachment.

The Washington lawyer David Rivkin and Florida International University law professor Elizabeth Foley suggest a broader approach that doesn't require legislators to act as individuals. They're trying to persuade House leaders to mount an institutional challenge to the White House rewrite of ObamaCare's employer mandate. Here the President is defying the plain language of laws and undermining legislative power. The courts ought to extend standing to the House as an institution to vindicate this injury. Short of impeachment, there is no other way for Congress to defend its constitutional prerogatives and the rule of law.

Earlier this year the Tenth Circuit used this theory to grant legislative standing to a group of liberal Colorado representatives to challenge that state's taxpayer bill of rights. Last year the Supreme Court also granted standing to Congress's Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.

The White House had refused to advocate for DOMA based on a constitutional theory that then had no established judicial precedent. The Court ruled in Windsor that deliberately making the Defense of Marriage Act a legal orphan "poses grave challenges to the separation of powers for the Executive at a particular moment to be able to nullify Congress's enactment solely on its own initiative and without any determination from the Court."

All this recalls the revival of federalism under the William Rehnquist Supreme Court. From the New Deal to the late 20th century there were few tangible protections of the powers the Constitution reserves to the states or the people, and any doctrine that limited federal incursion was assumed a dead letter.

But beginning with the 1992 landmark New York v. United States, the Court began to rediscover the government of enumerated powers that the framers envisioned. A 6-3 majority overturned a 1985 federal law that ordered states to dispose of radioactive waste within their own borders because "the accountability of both state and federal officials is diminished."

The ballot box is the most important constitutional check on government, but voters can't know whom to reward or punish if Congress impresses states into federal service. Political actors must "suffer the consequences," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor held in N.Y. v. U.S., if their decisions turn out to be "detrimental or unpopular. But where the federal government directs the states to regulate, it may be state officials who will bear the brunt of public disapproval, while the federal officials who devised the regulatory program may remain insulated from the electoral ramifications of their decision."

This jurisprudence turned on the "vertical" separation of federal and state power. Mr. Obama's suspension adventures pose precisely the same questions about the "horizontal" division of powers, and the same logic applies. If the executive branch is allowed to rewrite or suspend statutes, it is harder and in some cases impossible for voters to know which parties and spheres of the government to hold responsible. Political accountability is undermined.

The legal establishment will dismiss Messrs. Johnson and Rivkin as cranks with no hope of success, but it has been wrong before. The President thinks he can disregard the laws, but judges are paid to defend them.

Nice country we live in. With so many scandals and deceptions, people forget that this one is outrageous! Especially the people who not at all politically aligned with the tea party are not feeling or expressing enough outrage (IMHO). Do people think your government will only take freedom away from others?

The timeline of the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups reveals nothing less than a scandal. It is a scandal that blew into public view a year ago this week and about which the press has been far from curious.

In 2009, the president of the United States commented in a commencement address that the IRS would soon be auditing the president of the university and the Board of Regents for refusing to grant him an honorary degree. Supporters of the president dismissed critics who worried that the "joke" was a "dog whistle" intended to declare open season on the president's political opponents.

In January 2010, the president in his State of the Union Address publicly berated the six Supreme Court justices in attendance for their decision in Citizens United, which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and labor unions.

In the wake of Citizens United, many political groups formed in opposition to the president applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, which does not require the disclosure of donors. Senators of the president's party called on the IRS to investigate these groups.

In March 2010, employees in the IRS branch office tasked with reviewing applications for tax-exempt status were instructed to give special scrutiny to certain applications for 501(c)(4) status, later memorialized in a "Be on the Look Out" (BOLO) list of targeted terms. Over the next two years, the IRS slow-walked the applications of many such groups, limiting their ability to participate in the 2010 and 2012 political campaigns.

In March 2012, the IRS commissioner testified before a House committee that there was "absolutely no targeting" by the IRS of political organizations opposed to the president. The subcommittee chairman requested the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to investigate. The IRS commissioner resigned later that year.

On May 10, 2013, four days before the public release of the TIGTA report, the IRS director Exempt Organization Director (IRS director) apologized for the "absolutely inappropriate" actions of low-level IRS branch office employees and denied any involvement by high-level IRS officials in Washington, D.C.

On May 14, 2013, TIGTA publicly released its report detailing the IRS' inappropriate targeting of the president's political opponents. The president directed the secretary of the Treasury to hold accountable those IRS employees responsible for the targeting, and the attorney general announced that the Department of Justice would launch a criminal investigation. The following day, the acting IRS commissioner resigned.

On May 22, 2013, the IRS director asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify before a House committee. She was placed on administrative leave. The following month, it was revealed that she received a $42,000 bonus. She retired in September.

On Jan. 9, 2014, it was revealed that the Department of Justice attorney leading the investigation was a donor to the president's campaigns. A week later, the Justice Department revealed it would not bring any criminal charges. Attorneys for many of the targeted political groups complained that they had never been contacted in the investigation.

On Feb. 2, 2014, the president stated in a televised interview before the Super Bowl that although there "were some bone-headed decisions out of a local (IRS) office ... (there was) not even a smidgen of corruption."

On May 7, 2014, the House voted 231-187 to hold the former IRS director in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in its investigation (six members of the president's party voted with the majority). The House also voted 250-168 to request the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate (26 members of the president's party voted with the majority).

To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill: Now imagine the president is a Republican.

We've already seen that movie, and it was called Watergate.

In that scandal, aggressive reporting by the media and thorough investigations by the FBI, Justice Department and a Senate Select Committee painstakingly uncovered the facts of the illegal break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters months before the 1972 presidential election. One of the three articles of impeachment charged that President Nixon had attempted to use the IRS against his political opponents.*more at link*

Paul L. Caron is professor of law at Pepperdine University. He blogs at TaxProf Blog

My first reaction is that it is an outright lie. I'm sure that this can be demonstrated with a little research. ThinkProgress is a hard-core leftist pro-Democrat organization, and is notorious for putting out garbage, not unlike Jay Carney.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

It is well established that the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party and Patriot groups before the 2012 presidential election. Conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status were delayed and denied using special scrutiny from the IRS. At first, officials blamed "low-level employees" in the Cincinnati IRS office for the misconduct, but as more information came to light, it is evident the targeting was broader and instructions came from higher up. New emails revealed this week show it was indeed political and directed from Washington.

Judicial Watch secured the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. It's not the first time the group has discovered a bombshell -- they reported previous IRS revelations, as well as the Benghazi smoking gun.

"One key email string from July 2012 confirms that IRS Tea Party scrutiny was directed from Washington, DC," Judicial Watch reports. "On July 6, 2010, Holly Paz (the former Director of the IRS Rulings and Agreements Division and current Manager of Exempt Organizations Guidance) asks IRS lawyer Steven Grodnitzky 'to let Cindy and Sharon know how we have been handling Tea Party applications in the last few months.' Cindy Thomas is the former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations office in Cincinnati and Sharon Camarillo was a Senior Manager in their Los Angeles office. Grodnitzky, a top lawyer in the Exempt Organization Technical unit (EOT) in Washington, DC, responds:

'EOT is working the Tea party applications in coordination with Cincy. We are developing a few applications here in DC and providing copies of our development letters with the agent to use as examples in the development of their cases. Chip Hull [another lawyer in IRS headquarters] is working these cases in EOT and working with the agent in Cincy, so any communication should include him as well. Because the Tea party applications are the subject of an SCR [Sensitive Case Report], we cannot resolve any of the cases without coordinating with Rob [Choi, then-Director of Rulings and Agreements in the IRS's DC, headquarters].'"

Not only that, but Democrats in Congress were involved. Judicial Watch reports, "A series of letters between Senator Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations, and top IRS officials throughout 2012 discuss how to target conservative groups the senator claimed were 'engaged in political activities.'" Levin demanded scrutiny for conservative groups like Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform, the 60 Plus Association and the Susan B. Anthony List.

Last week, Congress held retired IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt for her refusal to answer any questions about her sizeable role in the scrutiny. But it's doubtful she or anyone else involved in this scandal will face any real consequences.

As with Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and every other scandal of this administration, their primary goal has been to cover it up and then treat it as old news when facts confront them. As commentator Charles Krauthammer put it, "This a major abuse of power. They covered up for two years and now they say, 'Hey, dude, two-year-old story.' So it's old news. Let's see if the mainstream media will treat it as old news or what it really is -- new news of misleading America and covering it up." We think the answer on that last part is obvious. How high does the scandal go? We still don't and may never know.

Nothing on progressive donors being be personally more likely to receive a full IRS audit in the article. Nothing on the delays to get certified that cost tea party the right to participate in the 2012 election. Perhaps progressive groups were given 'some scrutiny as legal cover for the worst abuse of power since - well - before Nixon and Watergate.

Were progressive groups asked the same intrusive questions asked of the tea party groups?(If they were asked all of these, why did they NOT speak up at the time?)

“Provide a list of all issues that are important to your organization. Indicate your position regarding each issue.”“Please explain in detail the derivation of your organization’s name.” (in a letter to the Ohio-based 1851 Center for Constitutional Law)“Please explain in detail your organization’s involvement with the Tea Party.”“Provide details regarding your relationship with Justin Binik-Thomas.” (a Cincinnati-area Tea-Party activist)“Provide information regarding the Butler County Teen Age Republicans and your relationship.”“Submit the following information relating to your past and present directors, officers, and key employees: a) Provide a resume for each.”“The names of the donors, contributors, and grantors. … The amounts of each of the donations, contributions, and grants and the dates you received them.”“The names of persons from your organization and the amount of time they spent on the event or program.” (for events)“Provide copies of the handbills you distributed at your monthly meetings.”“Fully describe your youth outreach program with the local school.”“Please provide copies of all your current web pages, including your Blog posts. Please provide copies of all of your newsletters, bulletins, flyers, newsletters or any other media or literature you have disseminated to your members or others. Please provide copies of stories and articles that have been published about you.”“Are you on Facebook or other social networking sites? If yes, provide copies of these pages.”“Provide copies of the agendas and minutes of your Board meetings and, if applicable, members ship meetings, including a description of legislative and electoral issues discussed, and whether candidates for political office were invited to address the meeting.”“Do your issue-related advocacy communications compare to the positions of candidates or slates of candidates on these issues with your positions? Provide copies of these communications. What percentage do these constitute of your issue-related advocacy communications?”“Do you have a close relationship with any candidate for political office or political party? If so describe fully the nature of that relationship.”“Apart from your responses to the preceding, estimate the percentage of your time and what percentage of your resources you will devote to activities in the 2012 election cycle, in which you will explicitly or implicitly support or oppose a candidate, candidates or slates of candidates, for public office.”http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/weirdest-irs-questions-for-the-tea-party-views-donors-and-etymology/http://media.aclj.org/pdf/issa-jordan-letter-to-irs-regarding-intrusive-tea-party-questionnaires.pdfhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/10/10-crazy-things-the-irs-asked-tea-party-groups/http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/4-7-2014-IRS-Staff-Report-w-appendix.pdf

O'Reilly said tonight on his program that he spoke with an anonymous source close to the White House who said Obama has concluded public opinion no longer matters, and he is simply going to do what he wants going forward without regard to public opinion. My question to O'Reilly is this: "Excuse me, Captain Obvious - but since when has Obama cared about the law or public opinion? What has changed? How dense are you that you are just realizing this now? You had to have some source close to the White House tell you this?"

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

The Framers had it wrong on checks and balances. As he has clearly and directly said, I will go through Congress when they agree with me and go around them otherwise.

The law he signed was unconstitutional and the release was illegal. Who cares, right? No consequence. It's not like we're a nation of laws. Yes, he cannot be impeached; iImpeachment like everything else including the Court is political. --------------------------------

IRS GAVE FBI 1.1 MILLION PAGES OF TAXPAYER DATA TO ENCOURAGE PROSECUTION OF CONSERVATIVES By John Hinderacker, PowerlineblogIt is just about impossible to keep up with all of the Obama administration scandals, but the corruption of the Internal Revenue Service ranks near the top. Unfortunately, it has gone hand in hand with Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s corruption of the Department of Justice. The perversion of law enforcement agencies for political ends is starkly revealed by the fact that in 2010, as part of its effort to stem the Tea Party movement, the IRS gave the FBI disks containing more than 1.1 million pages of documents on Section 501 non-profits, so that the FBI could selectively prosecute conservative groups and donors.

The facts, as we know them so far, were laid out yesterday in a letter from Congressmen Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan to John Koskinen, Commissioner of the IRS. The letter includes a series of emails that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has finally obtained, after more than a year of stonewalling by the Obama administration. The IRS originally told the House committee–falsely–that the disks contained only publicly available filings by the non-profit organizations. But the IRS later admitted that it had illegally transferred confidential taxpayer information to the FBI.

The IRS’s purpose was explicitly political. Sarah Ingram, Lois Lerner’s predecessor in charge of tax-exempt organizations at the IRS, wrote in a September 21, 2010 email, the subject of which was a favorable front-page story in the New York Times:

Thanks, as always, for the excellent support from Media. I do think it came out pretty well. The “secret donor” theme will continue–see Obama salvo today and Diane Reehm (sp).

The reference is to Diane Rehm, an NPR radio host. So the IRS, at its highest levels, was trying to advance the Democratic Party’s “secret donor” theme on the eve of the 2010 election, and breaking the law to do so. Could someone maybe go to jail one of these days?

When will Obama administration criminals pay the price?

Here is the Issa/Jordan letter in its entirety. You really should read it; hardly anyone will. It tells a sad story of government corruption and stonewalling, the hallmarks of the Obama administration. It also reminds us that there are Republicans in Washington who are doing great work, trying to sustain the rule of law under very difficult conditions. One more thought about that in a moment; first, the letter: (below)

A final thought: I [John Hinderacker, Powerline] have spent my entire adult life in the world of litigation. It is not unusual for parties to lawsuits to stonewall, to obfuscate, sometimes even to lie, as the Obama administration did here, in order to prevent damaging facts from coming to light. Yet litigants rarely succeed in their stonewalling in the way the Obama administration has successfully stonewalled, time after time.

Why is that? The answer is simple: in a lawsuit, the discovery process is supervised by a judge or (in the federal system) a magistrate. A party that refuses to answer questions or produce documents on the basis of flimsy objections, as happened here–the objections quoted in the Issa/Jordan letter are laughable–will be ordered by the court to comply, and may have sanctions assessed against it. The problem that Congressional investigators face is that there is no judge. Legal process can be invoked, of course, as a last resort, as happens on rare occasions. But that takes years; no judge sits ready to rule on frivolous positions like those so often taken by the Obama administration. In the political realm, the only real judge is the electorate. So far, at least, that is not a reassuring thought.

The IRS—remember those jaunty folks?—announced Friday that it can't find two years of emails from Lois Lerner to the Departments of Justice or Treasury. And none to the White House or Democrats on Capitol Hill. An agency spokesman blames a computer crash.

Never underestimate government incompetence, but how convenient. The former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations was at the center of the IRS targeting of conservative groups and still won't testify before Congress. Now we'll never know whose orders she was following, or what directions she was giving. If the Reagan White House had ever offered up this excuse, John Dingell would have held the entire government in contempt.

The suspicion that this is willful obstruction of Congress is all the more warranted because this week we also learned that the IRS, days before the 2010 election, shipped a 1.1 million page database about tax-exempt groups to the FBI. Why? New emails turned up by Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee show Department of Justice officials worked with Ms. Lerner to investigate groups critical of President Obama.

How out of bounds was this data dump? Consider the usual procedure. The IRS is charged with granting tax-exempt status to social-welfare organizations that spend less than 50% of their resources on politics. If the IRS believes a group has violated those rules, it can assign an agent to investigate and revoke its tax-exempt status. This routinely happens and isn't a criminal offense.Enlarge Image

U.S. Director of Exempt Organizations for the Internal Revenue Service Lois Lerner Reuters

Ms. Lerner, by contrast, shipped a database of 12,000 nonprofit tax returns to the FBI, the investigating agency for Justice's Criminal Division. The IRS, in other words, was inviting Justice to engage in a fishing expedition, and inviting people not even licensed to fish in that pond. The Criminal Division (rather than the Tax Division) investigates and prosecutes under the Internal Revenue Code only when the crimes involve IRS personnel.

The Criminal Division knows this, which explains why the emails show that Ms. Lerner was meeting to discuss the possibility of using different statutes, specifically campaign-finance laws, to prosecute nonprofits. A separate email from September 2010 shows Jack Smith, the head of Justice's Public Integrity Unit (part of the Criminal Division) musing over whether Justice might instead "ever charge a 371" against nonprofits. A "371" refers to a section of the U.S. Code that allows prosecutors to broadly claim a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. You know, conspiracies like exercising the right to free political speech.

The IRS has admitted that this database included confidential taxpayer information—including donor details—for at least 33 nonprofits. The IRS claims this was inadvertent, and Justice says neither it nor the FBI used any information for any "investigative purpose." This blasé attitude is astonishing given the law on confidential taxpayer information was created to prevent federal agencies from misusing the information. News of this release alone ought to cause IRS heads to roll.

The latest revelations are a further refutation of Ms. Lerner's claim that the IRS targeting trickled up from underlings in the Cincinnati office. And they strongly add to the evidence that the IRS and Justice were motivated to target by the frequent calls for action by the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats.

One email from September 21, 2010 shows Sarah Hall Ingram, a senior IRS official, thanking the IRS media team for their work with a New York Times NYT -2.44% reporter on an article about nonprofits in elections. "I do think it came out pretty well," she writes, in an email that was also sent to Ms. Lerner. "The 'secret donor' theme will continue—see Obama salvo and today's [radio interview with House Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen ]."

Several nonprofit groups have recently filed complaints with the Senate Ethics Committee against nine Democratic Senators for improperly interfering with the IRS. It's one thing for Senators to ask an agency about the status of a rule or investigation. But it is extraordinary for Illinois's Dick Durbin to demand that tax authorities punish specific conservative organizations, or for Michigan's Carl Levin to order the IRS to hand over confidential nonprofit tax information.

And it's no surprise to learn that Justice's renewed interest in investigating nonprofits in early 2013 immediately followed a hearing by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in which he dragged in officials from Justice and the IRS and demanded action.***

It somehow took a year for the IRS to locate these Lerner exchanges with Justice, though they were clearly subject to Mr. Issa's original subpoenas. The Oversight Committee had to subpoena Justice to obtain them, and it only knew to do that after it was tipped to the correspondence by discoveries from the watchdog group Judicial Watch. Justice continues to drag its feet in offering up witnesses and documents. And now we have the two years of emails that have simply vanished into the government ether.

New IRS Commissioner John Koskinen promised to cooperate with Congress. But either he is being undermined by his staff, or he's aiding the agency's stonewalling. And now that we know that Justice was canoodling with Ms. Lerner, its own dilatory investigation becomes easier to understand. Or maybe that was a computer crash too.